The Encyclopedia of Fall: B is for BOG
It’s not often that a farmer’s hard work brings tour buses filled with camera-toting visitors, or families with children, or those who yearn for autumn beauty. But when cranberry farmers in southeastern Massachusetts, Down East Maine, and parts of Rhode Island bring in their crops in September and October and into November, they know they have company.
The fields are composed of sand and peat, and on their own wouldn’t interest most people–but when the berries ripen on the vines, the landscape is flooded till a sea of crimson spreads across it, and the harvest begins. Wherever the eye looks–heading west from Plymouth, Massachusetts, say, down Seven Hills Road and out Federal Furnace Road, or along Routes 106 and 44, or south on 58, through Carver, Wareham, and Middleborough, through Kingston, Plympton, and Halifax–it’s a sight to remember.
A number of farmers welcome visitors, and some even let you close to the bogs. Many will pause in their work–as generations before them have–to talk bogs and berries.
Read more about Autumn A to Z in the September/October issue of Yankee Magazine
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If you’re lucky enough to witness this it can be a truely unique sight as far as fall goes in New England. A flooded bog with all the cranberries floating
will rival and fall foliage scene..